The serpent had said
that their eyes should be opened, and they should be as gods, knowing good
and evil. We read, "And the eyes of them both were opened;" but God in His
word tells us of those whose eyes "the God of this world hath blinded."
They had no power to choose what was good; and tried to hide away from God.
And so the first man was driven out of God's garden, and there has never
been any way back to it at all! No way back to God either, for Adam or
for his children, except through Christ, "the Second Man, the Lord from
Heaven."
It was of this wonderful way, of Him who is "the Way," that God spoke when
He told the serpent that the Seed of the woman should bruise his head.
The Lord Jesus Christ was "the Seed," the One who loved us and gave Himself
for us: the One whom "God so loved the world" as to give, "that whosoever
believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life;" the One who
"once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to
God."
We have been learning something of how dreadful the bites of serpents are,
how full of deadly poison: and we have been reading how, by listening to
the old serpent, the poison of sin--having our own will, and thinking hard
thoughts of God--came into the hearts of God's creatures, bringing sorrow,
and shame, and death with it. How beautiful that the righteous One in whom
was no sin, and who come to take away our sins, should tell us that "As
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man
be lifted up.
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